Four Critical Human Skills AI Can’t Bring In … And Sales Needs All Four
What are human skills?
Harvard Business School Online defines human skills as “capabilities that rely on distinctly human traits that AI and other digital technologies can't currently replicate or perform well”
According to that definition, those capabilities include the ability to:
- “Build, navigate, and sustain human relationships
- Perceive and interpret emotions and understand how they influence behavior
- Apply ethical reasoning informed by values, context, and lived experience
- Make judgment calls in ambiguous situations without clear right or wrong answers
- Think strategically with layered context and long-term implications in mind”
Human Skills that AI Cannot Replace and How Sales Needs them All
A HBS Online blog by Tim Stobierski identifies the following 4 Important Human Skills AI Can’t Replace. These are uniquely human and they constitute a line that AI cannot cross.
Interestingly all 4 of them are essential skills required for excellence in sales as well:
- Emotional Intelligence and Human Connection – In tasks like creating text, images, videos and human like voice content and in analysing gigantic amounts of information on the web to produce coherent and well summarised responses to queries, at incredible speed, generative AI is vastly superior to human beings.
What it cannot summon is emotional intelligence and the ability to feel and express empathy, create trust, and forge genuine human connections. Sales roles require display of considerable emotional and social intelligence in dealing with Customers
- Active Listening and Meaning-Making – AI language models may appear to listen carefully and respond thoughtfully but they develop responses essentially by recognising patterns and predicting what will come next. They do not interpret meaning
In situations that call for nuance, appreciation of context and nonverbal cues like tone and body language, the AI bot’s limitation becomes evident. In sales and customer service, picking up messages from what has been left unsaid could be as important as understanding what was spoken
- Judgment in Ambiguous Situations – Problems with clear parameters, with right or wrong answers are best suited for AI. But it can be a struggle for AI to handle problems that need ‘satisficing’ solutions to be obtained using incomplete or unstructured data, where human judgment must step in to fill in the gaps.
Selling activity many times involves dealing with several stakeholders, forming judgements on their motivations and biases and working with available data
- Human Creativity and Challenging Assumptions – AI in its current stage of evolution, cannot produce path breaking inventions or innovations. AI can of course generate output that looks creative. It can do this at astonishing speed and scale. Even these outputs are the product of pattern recognition and recombination and not the result of innovation thinking.
In contrast, human creativity, brings into play imagination, intuition, and the ability to challenge assumptions. A salesperson needs to be creative and imaginative in dealing with other human beings and constantly changing internal and external conditions
Clearly sales professionals who are strong in the human dimensions of selling build themselves a moat that AI cannot cross easily
“As data and science become more accessible and more the production of software and AI, human creativity is becoming a more valuable commodity.”
— Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr
